February 11, 2018

Makeover Monday: The Winter Olympics

As the Winter Olympics started a few days ago, Rody Zakovich offered up his great Winter Olympics viz for a makeover. It can often be tough to makeover an already good viz, but I gave it a go anyway. Here's Rody's viz:

What works well?

Simple title and subtitle

Noting when he combined countries

Simple filtering

Nice small multiples design

Including summaries under each country name

Sorting the countries from most medals to least

Including blocks for each medal won

What could be improved?

Right-align the filter titles so they are next to the filter itself.

I'd prefer the gold medals at the bottom and bronze on top.

Provide an option to look at the top N countries so that you can see it one screen.

The x-axis doesn't make sense. If it's supposed to represent a year, why does it start at zero and end at 25?

What did I do?

Focused the visualisation on the cumulative medals won by the top 5 countries based on the filters; I did this by creating stepped lines based on Rody's tutorial.

Made the x-axis represent the number of years since a country first participated in the games; this makes comparing the cumulative medals easier. In other words, it's easier to see which country won medals the fastest.